Again, Cree was touched by her. A woman oscillating between the poles of fear and dismay on one hand, and that fierce resistance on the other – not unlike Cree herself, it occurred to her, bouncing between her almost overwhelming "susceptibility" and the need to confront it, master it. No, you couldn't run away with your tail between your legs.
Cree poured herself a second cup of tea. "You've had a very unusual experience, and it isn't easy to communicate those feelings. And I know that while seeing a ghost is frightening, what's more upsetting and confusing is the way it challenges your view of the world. Changes how you think of life, death, your place in the scheme of things. That in itself can be devastating."
Lila looked grateful that someone understood. "We always went to church! The ghost stuff, that was for voodoo people, or for the tourists – 1 always felt superior to it. And now look at me!" Starting to falter again.
"Just remember that feeling you talked about earlier. Get your back up. Please, tell me about it. Just tell it as you experienced it. Help me understand."
Lila rallied and began again.
She was uneasy the first day they spent there. It was one thing when the movers and painters and cleaners were coming in and out, but once everybody left it felt different. It was a bigger house than two people needed, twenty rooms plus the former slave quarters and carriage house, so she and Jack had really set up to live in about half the house, leaving the rest unused but mostly still furnished with the period furniture her father had installed. How Momma had lived there all those years with just a housekeeper, she didn't know.
The sense of unease grew until by the time she woke up in the middle of that first night and had to go to the bathroom, she couldn't bear to get out of bed. They had left the lights on in the hall, turned down on the dimmer switch, but it didn't help. There was this feeling of expectation, the sense that something was just about to happen. And it didn't help to have the murder to think about. But after a while she had to get up, leaving Jack asleep in the bed – always a deep sleeper, Jackie. She went out of the bedroom, and just as she turned into the hall she saw something move, slightly, right where the hall opened into the big room at the top of the front stairs. Something small, down near the floor. Beyond it, the darkness of the big central room loomed, the doorways of the front rooms just visible as rectangles of shadow on the far wall. She froze, choked with fear, and squinted at the thing from twenty feet away, trying to make out what it was in the dim light. She could see only a couple inches of it, flat on the floor and just emerging around the corner – brown, rounded, smooth, a little shiny. Oddly familiar, but incomprehensible.
Then it shifted again, tucking itself a little farther back out of view, and suddenly she made sense of what she was seeing. The toe of a shoe! Someone was standing just back of the corner, in the darkness of the big room. Waiting.
Telling it to Cree, her eyes got wide, a twitch tugged at her right cheek, her uneven brows danced out of control. Her chest was pumping in shallow, uneven breaths.
It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. She felt like she was going to be sick. Afraid to make a sound, unable to take her eyes off the shoe, she backed up. She made it to the bedroom doorway and went quickly to rouse Jack. He seemed to take forever to make sense of what she was whispering, Lila glancing over her shoulder and expecting to see whoever it was coming into the bedroom. But at last Jack got up, put on his robe, got his shotgun out of the armoire.
When they got out to the hall, the shoe wasn't there any more. Jack called out; no one answered. He noisily jacked a shell into the chamber and warned whoever that he was coming after him with a gun. Still no answer, no sound. And when they went around the corner, no one was there. No shoe, either. Jack gave her a skeptical scowl but dutifully went through the whole house with her.
They found nothing. All the doors and windows were locked. The security system was armed and in order. Everything was just as they'd left it when they'd gone to bed.
"Jack thought I'd imagined it. But, honestly – a shoe!" Lila's lips worked in frustration. "Who would imagine they saw the toe of a shoe?"
Cree just nodded. "What sort of shoe was it?"
Lila looked brought up short by the question, but she thought about it for a moment. "Well. A man's shoe. Brown leather, a dressy sort of shoe, I think. But I could only see the toe."
"A modern shoe? As opposed to, say, a shoe from the nineteenth century?"
"I really couldn't say. I… just don't know."
She made it through that night, persuaded she had imagined the shoe. But the next day Jack went to his office, leaving her alone at the house. There was still moving-in work to be done, putting things away, hanging a few paintings. A couple of friends called; she had nice chats with them. She turned on the kitchen TV, just for some noise. But the sense of unease grew again. There was a sense of something fluttering, some movement somewhere, but every time she darted her eyes to a doorway, window, or mirror, she saw nothing. It ate at her, nibbled at her calm, very nerve-wracking. Still, she managed to get the kitchen squared away, then went to the library to finish putting books onto the shelves. She also wanted to wax Daddy's old square grand piano, make the rosewood shine the way she remembered it.
She was working in the library when she heard a curious creaking sound. Not like wood, not like a floorboard, more like something under great pressure. A grating screech. It seemed a familiar sort of sound, but it wasn't until she'd listened to it come and go for a half an hour that she realized what it reminded her of. When her daughter Janine had been a teenager, she'd had a tooth-grinding problem, had to be fitted with a guard – some hormonal or peer-stress thing, the dentist said. Lila would hear it at night, a horrible sound, the sense of enormous pressure brought to bear in that poor girl's mouth. Skreeeeeeeak. That's what this sound was like: two hard surfaces grating together with tremendous force.
It seemed to be coming from the other end of the library, where two leather reading chairs bracketed her father's fine claw-foot table. She went over there to hear it better, worried that maybe it had to do with some structural problem in the old house, subsiding or something. Or termites – did termites make noise in the wood? When she got closer, she could tell it seemed to be coming from near the floor, but it stopped as soon as she bent to listen.
She waited, but it didn't start again until she resumed working. She made a mental note to talk to Ron about it and tried to put it out of her mind. It seemed to intensify, nagging like the fluttering motion, eating at her.
Jack came home, she cooked some dinner. Jack was in good spirits; he took a satisfied turn through the house to survey his new domain. Afterward they went to watch TV in the former music room, at the end of the east wing, which they'd set up as a den.
Sitting now in the bright, lake-facing sitting room, Lila was getting shakier, to the point where Cree almost interrupted her. Her empty teacup still hovered in front of her, wavering wildly. But obviously she was getting to something crucial, best to let her continue. Cree's empathic radar was going crazy, too, as some big terror moved into Lila like a gathering storm.
Much later, Jack asleep in front of the TV, Lila got up to go to the kitchen. When she passed the library, she heard the creak, louder now, and went to investigate. Down there near the claw-foot table. She bent down, hearing it so clearly she expected to see the damned termite, or whatever, right there. And then she saw what was making the noise.
The claws! Four carved legs of the table ending in eagle talons, each gripping a solid glass globe a little smaller than a tennis ball. The claws were alive. Lila saw the horny wooden fingers move, working their grip, clenching the glass with tremendous pressure, releasing, clenching. All four feet. The sound like teeth grinding. The table crouched like a horrible living animal suddenly transported into her house.